This YouTuber Printed A Song In 8 QR Codes — Here's How

Today, there are more modern ways to invite others to listen to music we adore, with Apple Music's collaborative playlists and Spotify codes as some widely used examples. However, there's still something undeniably romantic about sharing music through physical media, whether it's creating personalized cassettes or burning songs onto CDs. And if you're wondering whether it's possible to combine the best of both worlds, YouTuber Makestreme set out an experiment to fit an entire song into a QR code. He called this format a "QR cassette," as it uses eight QR codes printed on two sides of a paper — akin to sides A and B of a cassette. This way, a piece of paper can carry a song without the need for streaming or the internet, in general.

If you're interested in recreating this, there are a couple of programs you'll need to use — but the creator has laid out a comprehensive written guide along with the source code on Hackster for anyone who wants to give this a try. One thing you'll need to do is use Meta AI's EnCodec to compress the music file down to about 100 times smaller than its original file size (for a three-minute MP3 track, the starting file size might be about 3 to 3.5 megabytes, which would be way too much info to store on a handful of QR codes). Once you've compressed the track to no more than 24 KB in size, you can use the developer's custom Python script to split the track into eight version 40 QR codes — these are the highest-capacity QR codes we can use today, with each being capable of holding up to 3 KB of data.

Once you have successfully compressed an audio track into eight QR codes, the remaining challenge is to figure out how to play and listen to the song. Given that the song is converted into latent data, scanning the QR codes alone won't be enough — this format requires software that can easily identify and reconstruct the track for you. Once again, you can turn to the developer's custom Python script in the Hackster instructions for help with this step.

Apart from printing the QR codes, the developer took things a step further and made a small, long-range wireless transmitter called a LoRa radio to make offline transfers of QR cassettes between devices possible. While this is helpful toward the push for offline media sharing, it requires a layer of hardware and technical know-how that most people probably do not have.

Overall, if you enjoy tinkering with software, hardware, or just newer, unconventional ways of storing digital media, creating a QR cassette is worth trying. It's been well-received by many users online, but other commenters have pointed out that it would be easier for most people to simply use CDs to store their music. Of course, this does not mean the format should be ditched entirely. The QR cassette aptly belongs in the wide variety of unusual physical formats like miniature cardboard turntables, hand-cranked music boxes, or USB sticks as a way to listen to music. If nothing else, these QR cassettes offer a creative way for tinkerers to help bring offline music back in style during the streaming era.